Byrne shakes off the shackles of study

Sportswoman of the Year February award: Maybe it was just the relief of completing her final accountancy exams last year that has resulted in Jolene Byrne's exceptional form since early January, but, more probably, it's all down to the fact the American-born runner has been able to double the number of training hours she puts in every week, ever since she was free to put away the books.

Either way Byrne is in the form of her life and when she held off the challenge of Olympian Marie McCambridge last month to win her first Irish title at the National Cross Country Championships in Santry - thus becoming the first Donore Harriers woman to take the senior title - the success capped a wonderful spell for the 27-year-old.

In early January Byrne was the first Irish woman home in the European Cross Country Championships, finishing 16th, and just days later she took the race, with a stirring run, to the high-class contingent of African runners in the IAAF Grand Challenge International Cross Country event in Belfast, before finishing fifth.

She maintained that form a fortnight later when she finished second to European Cross Country champion Hayley Yelling in an international race in Cardiff, before triumphing in Santry last month - a run that helped the Donore team, completed by Adrienne Jordan, Ann Curley, Fiona Mahon, Karen Jackson and Mary McDermott and coached by Jim McNamara, to its first bronze in the championships.

Her Santry success secured Byrne her place on the Irish team for next month's World Cross Country Championships in France where, along with McCambridge, she will head the Irish challenge for honours in the senior women's long-course competition. With a schedule like that it's as well she is now a qualified chartered accountant.

Byrne hails from Middlebury in Indiana, but it was when she was on an athletics scholarship in Carolina she met her current coach, Karl Byrne, who also happens to be her husband. The Dubliner was a member of the college's men's team, with whom Jolene trained. And the rest . . . well, by 2001 they were married, living in Dublin and members of the Donore Harriers club in Chapelizod.

Now an Irish citizen, Byrne's display at the European Championships earned her a Government grant, of €11,500, for the first time. That support, allied to study-free evenings, could yet help her to greater heights.